Erik Harms

Erik Harms is Professor of Anthropology and International & Area Studies at Yale University, specializing in urban anthropology with a focus on Southeast Asia and Vietnam. He is the Chair of the Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies (CSEAS), and currently serves as Acting Chair in the Department of Anthropology (Fall Semester, 2024).

Professor Harms’ first book, Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), focused on the social and cultural effects of rapid urbanization on the fringes of Saigon—Ho Chi Minh City, developing a concept of “social edginess” which articulates how the production of symbolic and material space intersects with Vietnamese concepts of social space, rural-urban relations, and notions of “inside” and “outside.”  His second book, Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon (University of California Press, 2016), describes Saigon as a city of contrasts, where luxury housing developments rise from the rubble of demolished neighborhoods. The book shows how emergent forms of property rights, known in Vietnam as “land-use rights,” have produced both new real estate opportunities and unprecedented rates of dispossession. Focusing on two of the city’s most ambitious master-planned urban development projects, the ethnography reveals how Vietnamese conceptions of civility and property rights mingle with future-oriented urban aspirations and also how new conceptions of civility and rights are founded on dispossession. Harms is also the co-editor, along with Joshua Barker and Johan Lindquist, of the edited volume Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity (Hawaii, 2013).

At Yale, professor Harms teaches a mix of introductory lectures and advanced seminars on a range of topics that mix area-specific courses on Vietnam and Southeast Asia with more theory-driven courses in anthropology, ethnography, and urban studies.  Harms also teaches and advises PhD students who run Yale Anthropology’s Ethnography and Social Theory Colloquium. In 2021, he was awarded the Lex Hixon ’63 Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Social Sciences at Yale College. He also served as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology.

Professor Harms is the large section representative on the Section Assembly Executive Committee (SAEC) of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and a member of the AAA Executive Board. He served as the president of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA) from 2017-2019, was a member of the Southeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (SEAC), and is on the Editorial Board for numerous academic journals.